Death in the Strike Zone

For me, history begins with questions – questions that will not leave me alone. I have spent decades researching baseball’s beginnings, but a few years ago I realized that I knew very little about James Creighton, the sport’s first great star. I knew that he had a great impact on the game, but not much about exactly what he did and how he did it. It did not help that existing historical accounts and references are full of tall tales, inaccuracies and outright falsehoods. Even worse, Creighton was so revolutionary and innovative that most contemporary observers – including the journalists we rely on for most of what we know about the mid-19^th-century – did not understand what they were seeing when they watched Creighton pitch. Somewhere in the book, I wrote that viewing the game of baseball in the Amateur Era through the eyes of contemporary sportswriters was like reading a police reporter’s review of an opera.